Beware restricting people's right to vote

Hallelujah. Bravo to Judge Robert Simpson for removing the shame from the face of our state. Congratulations to Pocono Record for its firm stand against the ill-conceived discriminatory voter ID law.

This law is a rusty nail on the coffin of American democracy. Gov. Tom Corbett seems to have followed the path of European dictators prior to World War II, who destroyed parliamentary democracy by way of free elections. Hitler's Enabling Act of June 1933 comes to mind. It is also a reminder of the cynical answer given by the French prime minister Francois Guizot, to a delegation of citizens who had come to ask for expansion of the electoral vote: "Get rich." It all ended with the revolution of 1848.

More than 30 states have adopted laws restricting access to the voting booth to American citizens under a variety of pretexts, thus undermining the foundation of our democracy — the right to vote. Unless these laws are found to be unconstitutional for reasons of partisan interests, the erosion of our civil rights may lead us to the times before 1965.

Eventually, we may reach a point where the Periclean definition of democracy, of the fifth century B.C. Greece — "We are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many, and not of the few" — will no longer be applicable to the United States.

Likewise, the remark of Alexis de Tocqueville in the middle of the 19th century, in his classic "Democracy in America" — "In America ... the people prevail without impediment" — will be no longer valid and the last words of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address should be re-written to read: "Government of the people, by some of the people, for some of the people, shall not perish from the earth."